دانلود رایگان مقاله آزمون آماری به عنوان مانع فهم "دست پنهان " در آشکار سازی و پنهان کردن موارد مدیریت پروژه

summary

Albert O. Hirschman’s famous Principle of the Hiding Hand describes an unconscious predisposition of project managers: Projects are launched in the belief that one is prepared for every possible future diffi- culty. However, some potential problems are overlooked during the planning phase and surprisingly might surface later—making it necessary to deal with them. Recently, this concept was statistically tested by Bent Flyvbjerg in World Development, who concluded that the Principle is ‘‘wrong”, ‘‘biased” and ‘‘potentially disastrous.” However, it is not the Principle of the Hiding Hand that is faulty, but the methodological approach taken by Flyvbjerg. In fact, Flyvbjerg’s analysis is a telling example of what can go wrong if we assess the value of qualitative scholarship merely through the lens of large-n case quantitative analysis. Flyvbjerg seems to overlook both the context of the Hiding Hand and its connection to the work of Albert Hirschman. This article shows how specific notions of rigor can serve as a hindrance to understanding and thus belittle insights by one of the most original thinkers of the 20th century that are still useful in current debates on project management and expert behavior.

5. Conclusion

In 1970, Albert Hirschman published a paper in the journal World Politics entitled ‘‘The Search for Paradigms as a Hindrance to Understanding” (Hirschman, 1970b). Therein, Hirschman took issue with the then prevalent tendency of social scientists to rely excessively on comprehensive theory-building to explain observed socio-economic and political phenomena. In his view, this reliance on all-encompassing theoretical constructs prevented the search for context-specific explanations and solutions to pressing needs. It seems as if Flyvbjerg’s work is an example of the pendulum swinging into the other direction in which it is no longer reliance on theory that hinders understanding, but the overreliance on statistical tests as an end in itself. Even in 1970, Hirschman already saw this as a possible problem. ‘‘The spread of mindless number work in the social sciences” seemed to him like ‘‘a disease as prevalent and debilitating” as the overreliance on theory (Hirschman, 1970b, p. 329).